Below are my comments, thoughts and steps taken in preparation fora painting of "Sleeping Beauty." The procedures explained and shown are very similar to those I use for most paintings. So far I am up to the finished 'cartoon' stage for this painting. Soon I will mount a copy of the drawing to an primed aluminum panel for painting.

The focus of my art work centers around mythology, legends, fairytales and other figures in classical storytelling. So I have plenty of subjects from which to draw, all of whom are no longer tangled up in copyright issues. OTOH, they are characters and stories that have been explored by countless other artists over the centuries. So when tackling an idea I have to do an image search to see what others have done and try to not copy them.

Two years ago I decided to play around with some ideas for Sleeping Beauty (talk about a well-covered character from the fairy tales). I had an idea which I hadn't see done much at all, if any. I thought about doing her in a reclined position as opposed to how she's almost always portrayed as being flat on her back (an illusion to both sleep and death). I wanted a pose that captured the moment when she fell into sleep (no death symbolism here). I doodled up a few ideas and did an image search to see if any other painters had done the same. Aside from the myriad of Disney stills (I found if you add 'classical' to the search parameters you eliminate most of the Disney pictures) I found the vast majority of painters and illustrators had her lying down and not reclining being partly propped up by a chair/ bed or sofa. That’s until got to the end of the images and came across a few statues of her.

Statues of Sleeping Beauty? Yep. Lo and behold a German sculptor pretty much did exactly what I had been attempting in my idea. His name is Louis Sussmann-Hellborn and his "Sleeping Beauty" is a masterpiece and that's no exaggeration. Go look it up. So for two years I played around with this idea but I couldn't get past what Hellborn created. Either it was too close to his pose (which looks very natural and convincing) or it reminded me of the pose. So after two years I finally threw in the towel and used his statue as the center-piece for the concept I had come up with for Sleeping Beauty. I rationalized this by saying I was doing a painting, not a statue. So please forgive me for making this compromise, one I always explain to those who see the final detailed drawing upon which the painting will be based. I do this for two reasons, one to give proper credit, the other to make those unaware (such as I once was) of this statue, now aware of it. It is a magnificent piece of work. So consider my efforts to be a homage.

1) I collected as many internet photos I could find. I'm in the DC suburbs, the statue is in Germany and I'm not wealthy. So I had to collect reference from a distance. While there are plenty of photos, not many are hi-rez and there's probably much detail I am missing, but one does what one can. The flowers and leaves can be modified in my painting, but the detail of the chair is another matter. What one can see in one photo, can’ be easily seen in another. What you think you see in one does not look that way in the other. And of course the photos will be short on the three dimensionality of a design, depending on the angle.

2) I traced an outline of the statue from the best large photo I could find and then began to fill in the missing detail from other photos. I added in some shading to the tracing, as well. I always construct my drawings and painting first on tracing paper. I do so because it's cheap and I can flip it over and see the reverse of it to check for errors. Additionally, when it comes time to transfer the sketch from tracing paper to drawing paper, being thin the tracing paper makes it easier to see the outlines while copying on my light table.

5) All of these were then traced onto my drawing paper. Here a photo while I was about a third of the way through it (working left to right). You can see the area that's just in outlines and not yet shaded in.

Here's the finished drawing. It's 24"x36". I used F and HB pencils to create it. I'm still pondering if I will add a background (of pine trees) to the drawing. If I do it will be faint and washed out. The trees will be a background in the painting. From start to finish this took three weeks, many a ten hour day, some twelve hours.